


dogmoon

by sixwings (drfeels)



Category: Inazuma Eleven, Inazuma Eleven GO
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:25:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9110485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drfeels/pseuds/sixwings
Summary: When the moon comes back, everything is wrong.Kazemaru Ichirouta has lost control of his life since taking time off to come back to Japan to help Endou investigate the Fifth Sector, and he's yet to find a direction to take himself. Buried under too many cigarettes, his anxiety begins to surface, with only a newly-blossoming friendship with Fudou to look forward to.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This...turned out a lot lot lot longer than I'd planned it, and ended up a bit the opposite of how I originally intended to take it, but somehow I felt it was more interesting and flowed better that way. I tried to add a lot of smaller details about all the pressures Kazemaru is trying to deal with in his life, and some of them may be a bit vague, so I hope in the end everything seems to make sense. I apologize if there were things I left unclear. Also this fic is placed in early December despite the vague timeline of GO, but I felt a winter setting felt more appropriate, so please forgive my taking advantage of GO's loose timeline and tell yourself time passes faster in space, or something.

He doesn’t remember the dream anymore.

All he can remember now about it is Fudou Akio was there, smoking, and there had been a dog? Could that be?

No, there had definitely been a dog.

There had definitely been smoke, too, coming out of Fudou’s mouth and all of his fingertips, so thick he nearly choked.

He rubs the pillow crease lines out of his cheek and thinks of that for a second. Why do you always either dream about people you really know or people you hardly know, and never anyone in-between?

It’s five a.m., so why is he awake?

It’s a moment before he hears it. The long, high, piercing howl of a dog. It’s coming from the floor above, right above his head. He vaguely remembers the neighbors there and their dog, something white and sleek with a curled tail. That must be the one.

It looks enough like a wolf to make noise like one, though he doesn’t remember it doing this before. Maybe it’s been left alone.

He regathers his pillow in his fists and rolls it around his head to dull the noise when he notices the light from the corner of his eye. A phone message, at this time? Any of them ever up this early to run don’t text until after breakfast. He clumsily unlocks the screen with his thumb and squints as the too-bright screen in the early morning darkness.

It’s Kidou.

 

> **k_yuuto:**
> 
> _The moon is back._

* * *

The party at Gouenji’s flat is a The-Moon-Is-Back party. Or well, that is the truth behind it.

“I thought the official government stance is that it never left,” he says to Kidou.

Kidou smiles as he opens his third beer. “It is, it is,” he says, cheeks looking a bit more bright and flushed than usual. “Which is why if anyone asks, we were never here and we never celebrated anything.”

They’ve packed themselves all in as tightly as they can possibly get, despite the sheer size of Gouenji’s flat, which in itself is far too big for just one person. There are people here he hasn’t seen in years, but somehow they’ve all been drawn back into Inazuma Town, just as always. It seems like the center of gravity is here, and no matter how far any of them wander they’re always pulled back in one way or another.

The door swings open and Sakuma and Genda arrive with fanfare. And a cake.

Slices are passed out among them and Kabeyama hands him one. They sit down anywhere they can find and chat idly. His cake is gone before he remembers the taste of it, and Kabeyama offers to get another. He’s going for his third. He insists no, no he’s fine, but Kabeyama is free to have his extra share, which lights up those large, hungry eyes of his.

He reaches in the pocket of his sweatshirt for his cigarettes, only to realize he’s without a lighter.

Unlucky.

He opens another beer, then another, and before he knows it an hour has passed, Fubuki and Someoka have arrived on a flight from Hokkaido, luggage still in tow. The cake has already been decimated, and someone’s gone and eaten the plating chocolate, leaving it with strawberries surrounding a large blank spot of nothing.

From behind the clouds, as though it’s been there the whole time, the moon emerges. It stretches bright claws across Gouenji’s balcony and through the large glass doors. Though it’s already nearing December he pushes open the balcony door and drops his beer next to his feet on the pavement as he leans on the railing.

The cold air feels good against his cheeks, flushed from drinking. The wind slices at the tips of his ears, his eyelashes, his lips. He welcomes it.

The moon fills up his eyes.

It feels like the moon has never looked so bright, but is it more that he was never so aware until now? Or is it really that much brighter than before?

Maybe it’s not even the same moon.

He snorts at that idea because really, the whole situation has been so ridiculous that you could almost drive yourself crazy thinking about it any deeper than necessary. Gouenji is still trying to regain the weight he’s lost worrying about it. Tonight he looks like someone who’s finally gotten a real night’s sleep after seven thousand years without any. The life is finally back in his deep, glossy eyes, there’s signs of healing around the cracking skin of his lips, and he’s bandaged the nails he’s taken to biting raw out of anxiety. He doesn’t know what the now-missing plating chocolate on the cake had said, but he hopes it was something like, _“Congratulations, Gouenji!!”_ , just for his sake.

His breath fogs over the railing and when the wind whips his hair to the side, the sweat on the back of his neck cools and he shivers. Somewhere out there, the children who saved them are sleeping.

He was one of those children, once. Saving the world.

_Almost ending it._

Thinking about it sets his teeth on edge, and he fingers his packet of cigarettes, even though they’re useless.

The glass door slides open and Sakuma is there, still in his work suit, though now missing all of the top pieces except his collared shirt, which is half-unbuttoned. He’s got a half-open pack of cigarettes and pulls one out before he hands one to Genda behind him. Fudou is leading up the rear, though he’s seen before he’s heard.

“--no, but I’m telling you, the thing won’t shut up, it’s been barking since this morning,” he’s saying to them, and he backs up to the balcony without even bothering to look behind him. He reaches for a cigarette from Genda, who looks torn, but hands the packet back to Sakuma, who shoves it back in the pocket of his trousers. “What, I can’t have one?”

“You have your own.” Sakuma rolls his eye as he cups his hand and lights up. “Don’t give me that look,” he says as he takes a drag, “I saw them earlier.”

“Fine.” Fudou pulls a half-crushed green box from his pocket. “I’m just down to my last two. Lighter?”

Sakuma rolls his visible eye again.

Fudou sighs and turns his head for the first time, as though he’s just noticed Kazemaru has been there the whole time. “Got a light?” he asks with a sly grin.

“Forgot.” He picks his beer up from next to Fudou’s foot and drains the rest. “Sorry.”

“Sakuma,” Fudou says, his tone half-serious, and Sakuma digs in his pocket and hands it over. “Thanks.”

“Sad,” Sakuma says, breathing out another wisp of smoke. “One of these days you’re gonna have to get your own.”

“Have one. Forgot it. Shoot me.”

“Gladly.”

“You two,” Genda sighs. He takes a long draw of his cigarette before he looks at it, conflicted for a moment, and then shoves it into the ash tray. “I don’t care if I barely got a smoke, it’s too cold. I’m going back for a beer.”

“I’ll come,” Sakuma says, following suit. He grabs for Genda’s hand and tangles the tips of their fingers together. “Fudou,” he says, voice rising to be heard over the din of the party as Genda slides the balcony door back open, “I want that lighter back. _Tomorrow._ ”

Fudou snorts as the door shuts behind them, leaving just the dull hum of people’s chatter and the searing cold whistle of the wind. He cups his hand tight while he holds the cigarette between his lips, holds the flame to the tip and it blooms bright for a second before it settles into hot red ash. He exhales, smiles, clamps it between his teeth.

“Need this?” he says, toying with the small black box between his fingers.

“Sure.”

Fudou motions for him to lean close and he does, brings out a cigarette and cups it the same way. It flares and dies and smoulders. He breathes it in deeply.

Peace.

They smoke in silence, their only contact the ash tray Fudou places between them on the balcony railing.

When the first burns down, he gestures for the lighter and starts up another.

Fudou laughs.

“You really smoke, huh.”

“Only sometimes.”

“I didn’t peg you the type,” he says. “You’re a runner, aren’t you? Always thought you'd stay away from this stuff.”

He shrugs. “It’s not so bad once and a while.”

Part of him really hates being together with everyone like this. Since a few years ago, now, he feels more alien among them than he used to. They _love_ him. They worry about him.

And that makes them all that much harder to deal with.

Fudou’s slim fingers curl around a new cigarette and the blooming flame from the lighter winds between the spaces in his fingers, for an instant burns that image, the curves and joints of them, behind the lids of his eyes.

There was a time, about eight years ago, when this sort of moment would have set that kind of blooming flicker in him.

It’s a time he remembers fragments of more often than he wants to, when he’d look at every one of them like a foreign object. The more foreign they were to him, the easier it was to treat any moment alone like it was the start of something becoming. At that time he’d always been hoping, hoping it’d end up as anything. Desperation.

Nothing ever came of any of those things.

But he remembers the time it was Fudou, the time he’d watch Fudou from his spot near the edge of the goal. Times when he’d hang back after practice matches, cleaning up equipment, desperately hoping they’d meet somewhere in the middle. They never did.

Now, looking back on the naiveté of sixteen, he laughs about it, only with himself.

Inside joke.

“What’s funny?”

Oh, had he done that out loud.

“You’re smiling.” Fudou pulls a beer can from his jacket pocket and pops it open. “First time I’ve seen it all night, you’ve looked so gloomy.”

“I slept horribly.” He taps the column of ash off the end of his cigarette into the tray and watches as it crumbles into a little formless pile.

“Sucks. I crashed at Genda’s.” He takes a long gulp of his beer and passes it over. Kazemaru takes a sip without thinking. Warm. Dark beer. He doesn’t really like dark beer. “I didn’t even get to sleep until like one anyway. And then at three Sakuma busts through the door. At that point he hadn’t even been home to his place yet, but he just busted in. I could just hear him whispering over and over, _‘Genda. Genda! Genda, they did it, Genda, the moon’s back! It’s back! They did it. They did it!’_. After that I think we all passed back out until lunch. Or I did.” Fudou burns out the stub of his cigarette and stares into his pack. “I’m out. You?”

He’s got one left, but it’s starting to lose the edge, and he wants to save it for some other time. But he wants an excuse to leave more than anything right now.

“Same,” he lies.

“I passed a kiosk on the way here, I think I’m gonna hit it up. Wanna join?”

Fudou’s eyes and his grin are bright and slick like the moon. Shining, even. Definitely someone who’s slept past noon. Definitely someone who sleeps past noon a lot. But it’s an excuse to head out without making it awkward, and maybe disappear if he feels like he doesn’t want to go back.

Fudou buys Mevius and pays all in coins.

Neither of them end up going back.

* * *

He only sleeps a few hours before he can’t anymore.

The moon still hasn’t gone down from the sky. He grabs his running shoes from under the bed and ties them on, still in his pajama sweats and sleep shirt. He pulls his bangs back in a thin elastic headband and ties up his hair so it hits the back of his neck with every step.

Fudou’s passed out on the couch in the living room.

He gently locks the door behind him and heads out. Still cold. A thin glaze of frost has taken over everything.

Still, he runs. He runs until he starts to feel the burn in his muscles, up his calves and into his thighs and through his chest until his body immolates itself and he’s nothing left except a trail of ashes scattered across the middle of Tokyo.

He runs until the moon dies out and the sun starts to break.

When he comes back, Fudou is awake and leafing through an old sports magazine. “Ah, ponytail. Haven’t seen that in a loooong time. Have a good run?”

“Good enough.” He takes the spare key from next to the door and throws it on the table. “You can go buy breakfast if you want, I’m going back to bed. Still tired. Leave it there when you leave.”

“Nah, I might sleep more too,” he says, sloppily throwing the magazine towards the living room table. He misses. “Still too early.”

Kazemaru strips out of all his clothes, pulls his hair down and falls back into his bed without any fanfare, or even a shower.

When he wakes, it’s 2 p.m. and Fudou is gone.

So is the key.

That night, for the first time in so long, there is the sight of a waning moon.

* * *

Clawing. Scratching. Scratching, nails against the wood of the floor. It’s sliding. Someone probably is playing fetch with it, that dog upstairs.

He wishes those people had gotten a cat.

He wishes he’d gotten a cat.

Everything is cold lately, and he’s considered setting up the kotatsu he has in storage, but it’s too much work for one person. He’d have to move the couch, turn the TV. He tries to find something to bide time until sleep. Lately it feels like that’s all he does, busy his hands, avoid checking his emails. There is only so much running and goal practice to do alone, and the time leftover trickles slowly and painfully.

He goes back to peeling the apples Aki’s given him, a gift from a tenant, she said she can’t possibly use them all. That’s probably untrue, but he appreciates that she has the sense and kindness to pretend like it is. They’re the best kind, a soft watercolor-washed skin of red and green, the kind you can smell through the peel when you lift them up to your nose.

He bites in, whole, and realizes he’s peeled too many. He covers the extra slices in plastic and puts them in the fridge. He’ll force himself to eat them later, even if they go brown.

Consequences.

He knows what she might be thinking. There’s been things said among them since age twenty, but he knows they’re only things said among people who mean well. Endou might stop them, if only, but Endou’s maybe too dense and too close to be told those kind of things. Endou still treats him like he always has. Endou still asks things of him, Endou tells jokes with him, Endou lays with him under the stars of God Eden and they talk about things, a lot of things.

It can’t even hurt anymore, because hurting would mean there’s regret left, and he can’t regret that.

People have confused killing time with mourning.

You can only mourn things you’ve lost. He can’t lose what he never had, he knew he’d never have.

He throws the apple core in the burnable trash and rinses the knife, sticks it to the magnet strip above the sink.

Grated apple into curry mix for dinner.

Normal evening. Nothing on tv, really, so he goes over some training regimens Kidou asks him to double check for the Raimon defenders. At 9 p.m. he goes out for a run. He’s in bed by 11 p.m., for once, and nearly out.

A soft knock.

He waits one beat, two, but it doesn’t come again. Maybe it’s the dog. Maybe it’s wind.

No, there’s another. He hasn’t imagined that.

Maybe a drunk at the wrong apartment.

That’s what he thinks until the turning of the key.

At that he is halfway across the apartment in two giant leaps to grab the door and he’s pulling the handle shut with all his might when a muffled voice from the other side says, “Oh, you’re home.”

He should’ve taken the key back before he forgot.

“You’re breaking into my house.”

He lets the knob go and Fudou pulls the door open with a little too much force. It slams into the outside wall, making one of the neighbors in the hall jump. He grumbles to himself and ushers Fudou in before he closes it behind him.

He wonders if Fudou is drunk before Fudou steps into the entrance and no. Completely and strangely lucid.

“I had a key.”

He extends his palm and motions for it. “ _My_ key.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever.” He holds out the plastic bag. “I brought beer. And croquettes. And a pack of cigarettes.”

This time of night, he should kick him out. Forcefully. Push him out the door and down the stairs.

His stomach growls. It’s been five hours since the curry, and he still has too many sliced apples in the fridge.

By the time he wakes up the next morning, the only proof Fudou was there at all are the six empty beer cans by the sink.

* * *

  
He’s beginning to think there is a conspiracy against him.

Sakuma corners him one day a few weeks later after a casual, last-minute practice match between the lot of them. Kazemaru’s dresses and showered, heading out the tunnel between the locker rooms and the entrance to Teikoku’s field. At the end he sees Fudou, who starts to raise his hand in greeting to Sakuma, but in no time at all he is expertly both ignoring Fudou and inviting Kazemaru out.

“Come drinking with me,” he says, and while he says it with a smile, it is not an open-ended invitation. It is an order from someone bred in that military Teikoku style, disguised as an optional task.

It’s not that they’re not friends, but rather, they’re just not the kind of friends who drink together. He hasn’t been to a bar alone in over a month, let alone with someone, but Sakuma already has a private room waiting at the izakaya. It’s bare save for one unexpected person: Midorikawa.

Either way, as he’s ushered in he can’t help but feel like he’s being set up for some kind of execution, until Sakuma orders beers for all three, half the menu’s worth of food, and then hands the menus right back without even consulting either of them.

Midorikawa is already halfway through one beer. He sucks the rest of it down in under a minute and buries his head on the table. Sakuma leans back once the door is shut and his demeanor loosens.

“You and I,” Sakuma says, pulling his tie away from his throat with two fingers, “need to talk a little. And he,” he points to Midorikawa, “just really needed a break.”

The beers come right as Sakuma says that, and he takes a long drought of the tall glass in front of him.

“I’ve been coding for six days straight,” Midorikawa says to no one in particular, and largely into the mouth of his beer glass. “Finished Monday. System crashed. It’s Wednesday now. I don’t ever want to see another player data sheet again, but we’re not even half-done redoing what we already did.”

“Hiroto?” Kazemaru asks.

“At the new branch in Nagano. The worst timing, he won’t be back until next week.” He blows his bangs out of his face. “Mercury is in retrograde.”

“Is that your proverb?”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Sakuma offers a sympathetic smile and pushes a bowl of peanuts towards him. Midorikawa grabs at it and a few roll from between his fingers onto the floor. He sighs deeply and continues nursing his beer.

“That aside,” Kazemaru takes a sip of his beer and grabs for the peanuts, which already seem to be half-gone under Midorikawa’s supervision. “Why’d you ask me? You said we had to talk. Is this about what I think it’s about?”

Sakuma smiles. “What do you think I think we need to talk about?”

“There’s only one thing besides soccer lately you and I have in common.”

“Oh,” Midorikawa says. “Is this about what everyone’s talking about?”

“Everyone?”

He feels a little insulted, almost.

“Fudou,” Sakuma says.

There is is. The word hangs thickly in the air for a moment, then drops like it’s been given a solid form to sit in the room with them.

The karaage comes, a deliverance of mercy, while he’s trying to think of something to say.

“We’re friends.”

“He’s crazy,” Sakuma says as he shoves a piece of karaage into his mouth. “I’m warning you now.”

“I thought you were friends?”

Sakuma laughs, but his eyes don’t. “I’m his best friend, which is why, as his best friend I’m trying to tell you, he’s crazy.” He punctuates his sentences with the waving of the empty karaage pick before he sets it back on the plate. “Fudou Akio is a soccer genuis, but that kind of genius comes with prices. Kidou’s the same way. He’s got the social skills of a goldfish. And Fudou has social skills of...something.”

He can’t help but snort, because it’s true. “I don’t know what you think we’re into, but he’s just come over to drink a few times. We’re friends. Not even close friends.”

“Just make sure he doesn’t walk all over you.” Sakuma picks up a chicken skewer and sheds the meat off neatly with shining white teeth. His single eye is still fixated, serious. “If you don’t give him boundaries, he won’t stop. You’re the serious type, so maybe you’ll be ok. But...” he stabs the bare skewer into one of the lettuce leaves on the plate, “he did say you let him break into your house.”

“He had a key.”

“Was he supposed to keep the key?”

His cheeks are starting to burn. He watches the beer bubbles float up the side of the glass as fat drops of condensation roll down. Light beer. The beer Fudou had brought was dark. Malty. Thick.

They bring Midorikawa his third beer, and Sakuma a glass of sake and some cod roe. Sakuma pushes the rest of the karaage across the table at him.

“Sorry if this feels like some sort of all-out assault,” he says quietly. “But I felt like I should talk to you. Fudou’s become a good guy, and I like him. But he’s not normal.”

“None of us is normal,” Midrokawa says. The slur that’s starting to appear in his voice is evident. He’s on that fine line, and this beer will put him over. “By the time I was fourteen I ruined what, like four schools? I’m not normal. ‘S not normal. None of us are normal things.”

“We were young,” Sakuma says. “We’ve grown up.”

“I hope so,” Kazemaru says as he finishes off his beer. He debates ordering a second, but he does. Restless as this is, going home just means an empty room to ponder all of this in. And Sakuma is paying. “I like to think we’re adults now.”

_I have to._

“We _are_ adults now,” Sakuma says.

“Adults with bad luck,” Midorikawa mumbles through a mouthful of cod roe. “It’s the moon. And Mercury. Anything that comes from space is bad for you.”

“Is that another proverb?”

“It’s my personal one.”

He can’t argue with that. There are too many dangerous things on Earth to begin with. He’s never been a coward but there are times when he remembers being so weak. That desperation. Earth is dangerous, and things beyond it even more so.

He’d text Endou for advice after this, but Endou thinks everyone is good as long as they can play soccer with straightforward purity, so Endou would just tell him to follow his heart. Good advice in theory, in practice absolutely terrible advice unless you’re someone who can’t do any wrong.

He is not, and never has been.

“Ah.” Sakuma pushes the leftover cod roe to Midorikawa who drunkenly inhales it all. “I want to eat daigaku imo. I wonder if it’s too late in the season for that now.” He doesn’t seem to be saying it to either of them in particular as he stretches and rummages in his inside jacket pocket, nor does he seem to care if they were paying attention.

Midorikawa is checking his horoscope on a cell phone app and he drinks his beer with one hand and no attention span.

Sakuma lights up a cigarette. Caster menthols. He holds the packet out, and Kazemaru takes one. The lighter Sakuma offers up is different. Red. Shiny. It must be new.

He’s beginning to think Fudou’s pockets must be made up of nothing up borrowed things.

Sakuma might know what he’s talking about.

* * *

Vivid, meaningless dreams.

_It’s the moon._

Since then, that’s all that runs through his head. A nearly-new moon in early December hangs too-bright in the sky whenever he tries to sleep. Just a sliver of moon left, but it looks like someone’s cut the sky open there with the way the light sears down.

He hasn’t seen Fudou in several days, and before he hadn’t thought much of it, but now he’s putting weight on that whole thing. For what purpose are these visits, to smoke? To drink? Fudou has other friends. He has Sakuma and Genda to indulge whatever his “normalcy” is, just like they’ve done all these years, that lack of normalcy Sakuma talked about with beer loosening his strict tongue.

Why had Fudou been coming here at all?

Maybe there is no answer.

Maybe the answer is just that--Fudou Akio is a person of whims, and that had been a whim.

His mind won’t leave that place. It plays over and over in his head all the words he can remember, and fills in the ones he can’t with whatever it thinks might’ve been said. It keeps looping. Over and over.

Over and over.

Until the moon wanes and disappears from the sky.

When he runs now it’s just dark. All he can see is the vast-expanding darkness. Tokyo’s city lights drown out the stars, all those tiny pinpricks of light. The sky has gone blank. There’s nothing left anymore.

His days are filled with long spans of nothing, sometimes being invited to attend to practice with the Raimon kids, sometimes being emailed training schedules and nutrition surveys for opinions. Other than that he’s stagnating. He trains, tries desperately to leave that pack of cigarettes Fudou bought him in his top dresser drawer. He didn’t leave Barcelona just to stagnate, just to smear ash across his lungs.

They haven’t asked him back yet, despite his records, despite his saves, despite his assists, his goals.

He is pretending to forget to check his email.

The pack of cigarettes dwindles from seven to three.

Fudou returns when the moon is new.

He shows up like it’s only the next day, with another case of beer, another pack of cigarettes, and a box of takoyaki. He’s wearing a different jacket, hair tied back. “Sorry,” he says. “I was with my kids.”

“Your what?”

“Yeah, yeah, my team! Resistance Japan, it’s a buncha kids from a lotta schools.” He sets everything down on the dining room table and cracks open a beer. “Kageyama had us formed up to take on the Inazuma Japan--er, Earth Eleven, is it--and it was a lot of fun, they wanted to keep playing a bit. Harder now that school’s back, but some of ‘em free up on Sundays, so we play with what we’ve got.”

He opens a beer for himself and cracks a wry smile. “I didn’t think you’d like kids.”

“I suppose I don’t seem the type, right? Guess it depends. I hate ones who don’t listen, but most of them do. I guess it’s just nice, having something to do. Like I never thought I’d have anyone look up to but,” --he pops a takoyaki in his mouth and swallows it in three bites-- “here I am. It’s good to get coaching experience, too. Good for later.”

“You going back soon?”

“To where?”

“Bayern-Munich. They asked you back, didn’t they?”

“Ah, that,” he says. “I don’t know. Might.”

He can’t help but bite down as he slips the unlit cigarette between his teeth. This is that sort of thing Sakuma talks about. Anyone normal _cares_. Anyone normal plans, has their flight tickets already bought, has their jerseys back at the clubhouse with their name on them already. It’s not like Fudou isn’t wanted, even. He’s been in demand for a long time. Brash, uncontrollable, completely awful to play with. Complete genius. Merciless. Beautiful.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Deep, deep jealousy sinking in him. He stares at the takoyaki. His stomach fills with stones. Smooth ones, pointed ones. It aches. It hurts.

“Wish I could be like that.”

Laugh. Cover-up.

Fudou can tell. Fudou is nothing if not a genius.

“You haven’t been offered?”

He sighs. The long-dreaded truth. He is beginning to unravel at the seams, has been for so long, but he’s worn thin in some places. Can’t sleep. The dog won’t stop howling, even at night, even when he tries to sleep in mid-afternoon. The moon is still showing up now before it’s dark, as a ghost, and that dog is howling. He’s bought earplugs, but they do nothing. It’s howling in his brain. In his dreams.

Fudou watches intently from over the lip of his beer, smoudering column of ash growing on his cigarette every second Kazemaru can’t bring himself to answer. His eyes don’t waver.

“They haven’t replied to me.”

“How long?”

“Since the moon’s back.”

“Shit, that’s like a month.”

“I know.” He doesn’t mean that to come out the way it does, but it comes out exactly how deep down, he means it. A choke, nearly on the verge of a tear. He holds them back under his lashes and swallows them, swallows the stones that tear at the lining of his stomach, keeps them down.

Not now, not like this.

Fudou’s cigarette falls into the ashtray. His jacket is soft. It smells like lingering smoke that’s been well-worn into the fabric. From underneath that there’s the warmth of Fudou’s body, the scent of beer off his breath. His hands smell like takoyaki.

He’s being held.

It feels like it’s been so long since he’s touched another human being. He’s shaking, why is he shaking. A high whine. Upstairs, the dog is howling, or maybe it’s just all in his head. Maybe everything is. Fudou’s hand pulls back a strand of hair stuck to his face. Fudou’s hands are trembling too. It’s something unfathomable.

This. This is not in his head.

Fudou, who puts him to bed at 9 p.m. as he cries, Fudou who lays down next to him, Fudou who smells like stale cigarettes and beer, Fudou who he murmurs to, “You’re too kind.”

To which Fudou replies, “Not really.”

His hands are searching for something in the dark searching, searching.

He finds it. Another hand. Fingers. Shaking. Twitching. They curl against his. Hot, so hot. It’s so hot and then they leave and it’s cool. Breeze washes over him. The window is open. There is no moon.

This all feels like a fever dream.

But he knows it’s not, because even the him of a fever dream would not fathom that Fudou Akio could have trembling hands.

* * *

_There is a dog, yes, there is definitely a dog. It’s chained in the center of the yard._

_Barking. It won’t stop._

_Fudou hands him a packet of Mevius but there’s only one left._

_“If you light one of these with the moon it’ll shut up,” he says, as he adjusts his game jersey for Paris Saint-Germain. “Bring it to cheer for me.”_

_The moon has gotten so close the sky is entirely white. His skin scalds. Moon-burn. The cigarette lights up neatly at the end and smoulders. Fudou scores three goals, but now he’s wearing the kit for LA Galaxy._

_He unchains the dog and gets on a bus, to watch Fudou’s match on the moon._

He wakes.

It’s 11 a.m. and the kitchen is clean. Fudou’s asleep on the couch, a scattering of limbs. Trash is sorted, dishes finished, and there is what looks like the start of breakfast on the kitchen shelf. He starts some coffee, and Fudou stirs. When he looks over Fudou’s half-awake, one eye open like a cat.

He stretches and pushes himself off the sofa. “I’m borrowing your shower.”

“That’s fine.”

“Oh, don’t make breakfast though,” he mumbles as he shuffles towards the toilet. “I’ll do it.”

It ends up being fried egg over rice with a side of cold tofu and a bowl of miso soup. Nothing special, but it fills his stomach with a warmth that blooms upward. Fudou’s egg is nearly raw, heavy with yoke that colors his rice and sinks into all the little cracks.

“You really need to go shopping,” Fudou says. “You have like, nothing.”

“I have eggs.”

“Not anymore. They’re gone, and your miso is almost out too. You’re gonna starve.”

“I don’t normally have to feed two,” he grumbles.

“I’ll pay for my half if you let me make dinner.”

He shoves some of the egg in his mouth. It is the strangest offer he’d never think would come out of Fudou, but at the same time maybe this is what Sakuma means. Boundaries, or he pushes, even if it seems too kind to be true.

“Fine, but no meat. And you’re not staying tonight, I need to be up early tomorrow. You’re not getting a key again.”

Fudou inhales a few gulps his coffee and then pauses. His mouth lingers on the rim of his mug, like he’s about to say something, he’s on the very edge of spitting it out, but then when his cup sets back down on the table and he swallows his last mouthful of coffee, he swallows his words with it.

“I had a dream about you,” he says, suddenly remembering those weirdly blurry details. “You were playing for Saint-Germain, and then...Galaxy? But it was on the moon.”

Fudou snorts. “Who am I, Beckham?”

“Huh?”

“Those are Beckham teams,” he says as he sips at his miso soup. “Not for me, I don’t give a shit about modeling underwear. But I’m glad your dreams think so highly of me, or whatever.”

He stares into the bottom of his soup bowl. There’s a bit of undissolved miso paste and seaweed stuck there. He wonders if you can read that, like tea leaves. Maybe it tells the future. A future with more miso soup. “Dreams never make any goddamn sense.”

“When I was a kid I used to get scared by ‘em,” Fudou says. “I thought maybe they’d predict the future if they were real enough. But nope,” he finishes off his coffee and pours out more from the french press, “robots never destroyed Tokyo, I’m so fucking lucky.”

“Did you dream?”

“Nope,” Fudou says, with so little hesitation it doesn’t feel like a real answer. “Your neighbor’s dog barks a lot, though. Jesus christ.”

“It’s been doing that since the moon came back.”

“Genda’s neighbor’s dog is the same, it’s just one of those tiny little things but the way it barks it must have lungs twice the size of it’s head. That night the moon came back, when Sakuma busted in I could hear it from the hall, just howling, barking. The next morning it was still barking. I think finally it had to sleep but jesus.” He shovels some egg-coated rice into his mouth and waves his chopsticks as he speaks. “It has teeth like a little shark too, like I’ve seen it in the hall and they dress it up in a cute little dress, but those teeth...tiny little fangs.” He shudders and makes pseudo-fangs with his fingers in front of his own lips. “Anything trying to be that cute is hiding something.”

“My neighbor’s dog isn’t that cute. Looks kinda like a wolf.”

“Yeah those, I like those,” Fudou says. “They look like how a dog is supposed to look.”

“I’ve been thinking I should get a cat,” Kazemaru says, and he piles up the dishes and drops them in the sink for later, now doesn’t feel like a good time. “I’ve always wanted a cat but we never had one.”

Fudou nods in approval. “Cats are good, you can’t dress up a cat. Genda has a cat. Big one.” He gestures the size with his hands, showing something the size of a small dog. “It likes me, but only when I’m cooking. Honest little sucker. It loves Sakuma most, I dunno why, it’s not even his house.”

He runs water over the dishes so the rice doesn’t dry up and stick. “Cats are weird like that.”

“They do what they want,” Fudou says. “I like that, I feel it. It’s the only way to live.”

“The only way?” He raises an eyebrow at that but bites his tongue. A very Fudou thing to say, somehow.

“Yeah. It’s bullshit, people who think you can get by without doing what you want. I’m not saying everyone should be an asshole, or that you can never be nice, but if you don’t do what you want, is that ok? Are you happy? My old man--” he cuts off, seeing the look Kazemaru’s trying to suppress, that weird jolt that shoots through the heart when Fudou mentions something like that, the same jolt he gets hearing a name like ‘Kageyama Reiji’, that supressed selection of forbidden, invisible people they don’t talk about.

“--yeah I know, I never talk about him,” Fudou says, seeing that face. “But anyways like, my old man, he tried to take the fall for his boss like he was supposed to, and it screwed his life up anyway. Screwed everything up. He was fucked either way, but maybe if he’d done what he wanted, he wouldn’t have hated himself, or maybe at least he wouldn’t have just left like he did. And I don’t really regret that,” he says, staring into his coffee mug. “I dunno if he’d have been a good dad or not. But I’d regret ending up like him, just doing what’s supposed to be the ‘right’ choice and getting fucked over. I tried a lot as a kid to live like that, but I fucked it up.”

He begins to trace the woodgrain pattern on the table with his fingernail. Kazemaru realises he has somehow used four times the soap he actually needs, but somehow that doesn’t even matter in the span of this. It’s all he can do to wait, heart pounding, for Fudou’s next words, words that drop quickly but hang in the air like smoke residue and ashes.

“I didn’t understand that the point isn’t that you do what you want all the time. Hurting people is stupid, getting power by hurting people is stupid. Power doesn’t mean jack shit if you don’t have anyone who likes you. They took the moon this time, but then what? Kageyama won’t always come back from the dead every time. The next time might be it.”

He takes a breath. Kazemaru starts doing the dishes quietly, if only because he feels like he can’t sit down and look Fudou in the eye, since Fudou’s talking to his coffee mug and the leftover rice grains on the table. Some conversations need to be listened to, not engaged in. He knows that. And when Fudou says that, _‘Hurting people is stupid,’_ he feels another splinter his the center of his heart, and it’s hard to swallow.

He tries to forget how much some of them have in common, he tries to forget because unlike the rest of them, he doesn’t have any excuses. Parents, married all the years he’s been alive and some before that. Stable, good home. Good academic standing. Friends. Track team medals.

It’d be so much easier to swallow if he’d had a reason besides frustration with normalcy, with his own lack of ability.

And now it’s coming back. Barcelona won’t reply to him, not because he’s not good but exactly because of that. He’s normal. Average. Replaceable. All he’s got going for him is the speed, the blessing of the wind, and even that has slowed.

He’d rather die than admit the truth: he has become forgettable.

But inside himself he’s already admitted it. He can’t say it out loud.

When you say things out loud, that’s when they turn real.

“But you have to do what you want,” Fudou says out loud to no one. “We’re not all gonna be like Beckham, we can’t all play until we’re 38. I want to play soccer, more than anything, but I also don’t want to wake up one day and realize that outside of soccer I have nothing else. Things like coaching kids, going out drinking, staying over at Genda’s, _this_..." he says, gesturing vaguely to the air of Kazemaru's apartment. "They seem stupid and trivial, but right now they’re what I want.”

The silence after he finishes hangs in the air, with nothing but the sound of the scrub brush against glass. He’s been scrubbing egg and rice off the same bowl for the past five minutes.

“We should make a grocery list.”

* * *

Fudou starts ignoring the grocery list about five minutes into shopping. Meat into the cart, though it’s 40% off because it’s near expiring, so he can’t argue with that. Miso paste, eggs, soy sauce, tonkatsu sauce, panko, cabbage, sesame seeds. Six pack of light beer.

Fudou pays for all of it without asking. He hands Kazemaru the bag and suggests ramen for dinner.

“We just _bought_ dinner.”

“Yeah, for you. For tomorrow. Right now I want ramen, and I’m hungry. C’mon.”

“You didn’t need to buy me groceries. I’m fine. I can feed myself, I can go shopping.”

“I know,” Fudou says. “But I ate all your eggs and your apples that one time, and your leftover curry, and I used up most of your miso paste. So I’m just repaying all at once. That’s easy, right?” He points to a nearby ramen stall. “This looks good. I hope they have pork bone.”

They do.

Fudou sucks down oily, fragrant pork bone ramen and Kazemaru orders shouyu for himself. He refuses to let Fudou pay this time, but it takes a full minute of insisting before Fudou gives up.

He’s being too nice.

It’s unsettling, in a way.

The most unsettling part is not knowing where it comes from, because the pit of his stomach tells him it’s pity. Fudou saw that raw, grotesque, sobbing mess last night and now he’s being treated like a glass vase on a high shelf, teetering on the edge. Fudou’s piling up pillows underneath out of fear, out of pity.

Pity gets you free apples and discount meat, at least. That’s a bonus.

They push their bowls back over the counter and their breath fogs as they pile on their coats and scarves and take their leave.

There’s no moon tonight as they leave the ramen stand. Just blackness, the stars are invisible within the lights that make up Tokyo. The same blackness he’s taken to running under, deep black-blue lit up by hundreds of metal towers.

Halfway home they stop in the park for a cigarette.

Fudou sits closed off as he brings out his lighter, legs together, back stiff. He’s on edge because Fudou’s on edge, but maybe Fudou’s on edge in the first place because he’s always on edge lately. He doesn’t know, he can’t read the atmosphere anymore, this weird tension that sometimes settles between them. He doesn’t have any answers to any of the questions he’d asked himself earlier in the week. Fudou does not provide easy answers for his motives. Right now, he’s leaning towards the motive of pity. That seems easiest. It’s also the worst, and makes him grit his teeth.

He just needs a cigarette. A cigarette and he’ll calm down, he’ll breathe in and calm himself and maybe this is the start of his questioning his smoking habit. Maybe he should cut back. Is that shaking in Fudou’s hands from craving? Is that the same shaking in his? He’s never spent a full day with him, he hasn’t ever seen Fudou smoke more than three at a time, but maybe that’s only when he’s with people, maybe alone it’s more.

Fudou’s hand brushes against his.

It’s so hot, hotter than the night before and he remembers, he remembers clinging tightly to that for a fraction of a second. He remembers that. The heat pulls away, rolls over, it’s gone, the sound of the bathroom door scraping and the toilet and it doesn’t come back. Couch cushions creaking outside the room. His lids are heavy, so heavy, it feels like he’ll never wake up again.

Blink. Back to now, the park lights are bright but Fudou’s face is lit by the smouldering end of his cigarette.

He takes out his pack, holds it out, Fudou clicks the wheel of Sakuma’s stolen lighter. Fudou’s crushing the end of his own cigarette between his teeth. His lips are chapped. He looks like he’s biting his tongue too.

Something reflects in those heavy-lidded and deep-set eyes. Ah, it’s himself, Fudou’s looking right at him as he holds the flame to the cigarette. It’s lit, it smokes from between his fingers, and as he goes to pull it to his lips there’s the sound of metal scraping against concrete. Sakuma’s lighter glints from the walkway. Dropped. Dropped because Fudou’s got a hand gently around his wrist, pulling the hand holding his cigarette away from his face, away from him.

Closer.

He smells the residue of smoke on Fudou’s breath.

Closer.

His lips are so hot, so warm he’s burning, everything inside him is burning, his stomach drops out and his heart folds over and pierces itself on the splinters of his ribs where his chest has burst open and there’s the smell of burning flesh.

Ah, that’s real. The back of Fudou’s hand has met his lit cigarette.

“Shit!”

Fudou drops his wrist and shakes his hand. A perfect small cylinder of singed flesh has bubbled up.

“Shit,” Fudou breathes again. He picks up Sakuma’s lighter from the ground and shoves it back in his pocket. He’s talking to the cement again, to the bench. He won’t look. He can’t. “Fuck, I’m sorry I--”

“Why.”

“I just didn’t know what to do anymore.”

He doesn’t understand it.

This is not what you do when you’re trying to pity someone. This is not pity.

What.

What is it.

His heart is racing so hard he can feel the push of the blood against the artery walls in his neck.

Fudou Akio begins to unravel before he can even organize his own thoughts.

“I just--I didn’t know how to say it,” he’s breathing. “Fuck, and now I fucked it up I just--I tried so hard, I wanted to confess this whole time, I just,” he breathes deep, in-out, in-out, “I didn’t know how to say it so you’d accept it.”

That had been a kiss.

That had been, if he is beginning to understand anything, a confession.

A confession.

He stares up at the sky, searching for the invisible moon.

He doesn’t know what to say, Fudou seems to be trying incredibly hard not to unravel into a pile of human-shaped threads and he doesn’t even know how to answer. This has not been something he has considered, or even thought once of, since so long ago. It’s not a matter of like. It’s a matter of beginning to even think of how Fudou is looking at him in that way, has clearly been looking at him that way for some time. What does he say to that.

Inside, he knows the answer.

His body is humming with it, his instinct is telling him exactly what he thought about it, what he wants, but the wheels of his brain are beginning to turn so fast that he hears nothing but their whine, the high-pitches hum of a machine on overdrive. High, piercing, white noise.

He blinks once, twice. Drops his cigarette into the ash tray on top of the garbage can next to him.

If he says it out loud, it comes true.

He turns.

Fudou is watching him wide-eyed, with the blank expression of someone trying to avoid feeling anything to prevent the overflow that will cause a breakdown. He blinks.

He is not holding a cigarette. His wrists do not need confining or separating.

He’s open for taking.

He pushes himself forward without thought, without any intent but the intent of doing exactly what his body wants but his mind is trying to resist doing. Rough, chapped lips that burn and taste like smoke. He presses firmly against them, then lets go.

Fudou still looks like he’s trying to prevent himself from unraveling. Kazemaru holds out a hand.

“Let’s go home.”

* * *

The beer is dropped on the table and torn open without mercy. Fudou begins to swallow one down so fast he starts to cough and choke. He pounds his chest with a fist until the sputtering stops and breathes, then he lays his head on the table, half-empty can clutched tightly in his fingers.

“I think I’m going to die now.”

“You’re not allowed.”

“No, no fucking really,” he breathes into the table. “I never thought I had a chance.”

“I didn’t even know you liked me.”

A grin creeps over his face. He slowly begins to spill out all of his insides all over the kitchen table like it’s a surgical bed. “Not always. But coming back to Japan, being on God Eden with you, I thought you were alright,” he says. “And before I knew it, talking to you, seeing you places...I kept watching you. I couldn’t help it.” Another swallow of beer. “The first time you invited me back to your place I thought I was gonna pass out. But I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to,” he mutters. “I wanted to touch you so badly.”

“Kinda surprised you didn’t, we were both drunk.” He wonders how it would’ve been then, how different things might have ended up. He knows how those things can end up. He knows well.

“I’m not a dick,” he says. “I’ve heard--” he cuts off, changes his direction abruptly, “I didn’t want it to start like that. You seemed kinda depressed that night.”

_I’ve heard--_ , he knows where that was going. The same place it always goes. The same reason Aki brings him bags of apples. The same reason he’s been teetering on that high shelf. He swallows.

It’s real, might as well make it so.

“It’s true,” he says with another swallow of beer. “I haven’t for a while but earlier this year, when we came back to Japan. After Endou’s wedding a few years ago,” he pauses before he continues, before he tips over the edge, before he spits out the truth he has been avoiding admitting, because it’s a truth that has been turning love into pity into worry into disaster. “I was picking up a lot of guys at bars. Nothing serious, but it happened. Nobody will let it go, either.” He sighs deeply and digs his fingernails into his jeans. “I know everyone talks.”

“They’re worriers. Sakuma talks about me like that to my face.” He grins. “Do you think uh, _this_ ,” he gestures between them, “is going to make them talk more or less?”

“They’re gonna worry about you being a bad influence on me, probably.”

“Maybe I am.”

“You were in high school,” he finds himself murmuring. Another truth that has tipped off his tongue into the abyss. Another one he has admitted, one he can’t take back.

But one nobody has talked about. A truth just for Fudou, just this time.

Fudou raises and eyebrow and smiles, because he can tell that there’s the tip of a story emerging here. “We weren’t friends in high school.”

“I had a crush on you, once, in second year,” he begins. “And--” he cuts off as Fudou’s grin gets even wider, “--don’t look like that, I crushed on a lot of people. But there was one time after a practice match between us where I was on duty for clean-up. And I saw you, back behind the equipment shed, lighting up a cigarette.” He licks his lips. “You can’t tell this to anyone, I mean anyone,” he says, “but it made me want to try it.”

Fudou’s still got a stupid grin. “I feel honored.”

“I was a very stupid kid.”

“So was I. I’m still honored.” He pulls himself closer, around the corner of the table so their knees are touching. He runs one finger over the back of Kazemaru’s hand resting on the table. “You never planned on confessing back then?”

“No, it was something I thought was for killing time. Having a boy to fantasize about. And,” he pauses, watching Fudou’s eyes gleam, “there were rumors you were dating Sakuma.”

His eyes widen and he lets out a snort. “Ah, that, no, we’d broken it off by midway through first year. Didn’t really work, we fought a lot. Fought and made out.” His eyes are clear and piercing as he speaks, as though he still remembers it fondly despite all of that. “If you’d said anything I probably would’ve took you up on it.” He leans in and there’s that slim, mischievous grin spreading across his lips. His hot breath tickles against the shell of Kazemaru’s ear and his fingers slowly pull the hair back from it, gently across his neck. “I would’ve rutted you into the ground.”

The shiver it sends through his body is unreasonable.

Hot, all the blood drains from his face and then rushes back so fast he feels dizzy. The carnality of being sixteen comes back to him and he remembers things he tries to pretend he didn’t do, he remembers what it’s like to pick a boy to fantasize about, to pick a boy and focus on his image and imagine what it’s like to have him hold you and kiss you and to want to touch him and grind against him. The sharp smell of sweat. Cigarette smoke. First cigarette, stolen, lit up in that same spot behind the equipment shed.

He remembers being virginal and jealous, watching them, wanting. Wanting to have someone to push back against him, anyone. Someone who wanted him.

Fudou holds him, now, Fudou’s lips have not left that spot next to his ear. He’s breathing, slowly, just breathing.

Slowly, Kazemaru breaks from the trance of memory he’s in, he wakes and this isn’t a dream, this hasn’t been a dream this whole time.

He gets on his knees and pushes Fudou back flat on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“What I want,” he says back, firmly, and he undoes the knot on Fudou’s sweatpants, pulls them down to his knees.

Fudou watches, breathing, eyes set. He doesn’t reply, doesn’t say anything, like maybe he thinks at some moment Kazemaru is going to stop and back up and decide this isn’t what he wants at all.

But that’s not a possibility anymore.

The true core of his sexuality, the part he’d pushed down so many years, the phenomena of _wanting_ , of being wanted, is beginning to bloom. Hot, bright red, like the petals of a camellia, it opens gently, softly. He feels it. He feels all the things he could never say, all the things he could never do up until now.

He wants to know what it’s like to unravel a person from the inside out, someone who wants you too, someone who’s flesh and bone are aching to tie you to them.

He pulls down Fudou’s underwear and there, between his thighs, is Fudou’s _want_. Half-hard, aching, waiting. He pushes his hair back behind his ears and bends low to it, pushes Fudou’s legs further apart. When he takes it in his mouth, for a second it seems Fudou has forgotten how to breathe.

But then it comes, shaking, deep, and he feels Fudou harden under his touch, under all the things he’s learned how to do with his tongue. All the things he wanted to do so long ago, things he didn’t even conceive could exist. Fudou tastes like salt and sweat and bitterness. He moans like a virgin when Kazemaru pushes himself down and it hits the back of his throat and he tightens it, tightens, in something he has found he has talent to do but so rarely does for anyone.

Fudou’s release is hot and quick and too fast and it drips from the back of his tongue down his throat so he barely tastes it. He wipes a quick tear from the corner of his eye and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, swallows the rest of Fudou down cleanly with the remainder of his beer.

Fudou’s face is red all the way up to the tops of his ears.

“Fuck.”

“Good?”

“Now I’m really going to die,” he groans and buries his face in his hands as he rolls over. He doesn’t even bother to pull up his pants, just lays there, paralyzed by the weight of it. “My luck is so good today it’s scary.”

“My luck has been shit for weeks,” Kazemaru says, thinking about the heaviness he’s endured up until now, a heaviness which has strangely left for a brief moment. “Someone even broke into my house.”

Fudou grins through his fingers. “He sounds terrible.”

“So awful I might invite him to sleep in my bed tonight.”

“You said you had to get up early.”

“Well, you never gave me back my key, so,” he grins at Fudou’s face, which doesn’t show a single trace of guilt at that. “I think you can lock up by yourself whenever you leave.”

“And what if I don’t leave?”

“I did say I wanted a cat.”

Fudou sits up. “Hey, don’t demote me from boyfriend to cat.”

His heart jumps.

“I never said you were my boyfriend.”

“Well I wanna be,” Fudou’s voice has that same Teikoku push, the confidence and steady command of a military boy, even one as wild as he’d been. “I like you. Go out with me. Be my boyfriend.”

Incredibly honest. Too honest, his body thrums just hearing that kind of confession.

He lets Fudou borrow a shirt for sleeping in and places a plaster gently over the burn on the back of his hand and they fall into his bed. Fudou’s mouth tastes like toothpaste. His hair still smells like cigarettes and there’s the faintness of beer under all that mint. But he lets Fudou kiss him goodnight, deep and slow and easy until he has to push him off, before it goes too far and they don’t get any sleep at all. He hasn’t showered yet, and he does not feel the least bit presentable for something like that.

“Hey,” Fudou’s hand drifts over the crotch of his sweatpants. “I didn’t get you off in return for earlier, I should, shouldn’t I?”

He pushes it off and groans and rolls over to turn off the lamp. “I already took care of it earlier. Not now. Sleep. Besides,” he adds, “if you’re really going to be my boyfriend, you’ll have plenty of time for that.”

“Good.” He can feel Fudou’s smile in the sound of his voice, even in the dark.

Fudou curls against his back. Ah, it’s warm again. That warmth. He recognizes it now. Fudou’s soft breath against the nape of his neck, just above the collar of his t-shirt. The pulse of blood. It feels comfortable.

The first man he’s had in this room who he hopes will still be there when morning comes.

His lids grow heavy. He finds peace in the blackness under his eyelids. The room is quiet save for the rustle of Fudou’s pillow as he turns it and lets Kazemaru to go, gives them both room to breathe. His muscles twitch with latent pulses as he falls into the sleep, takes a deep breath, and lets go.

Tonight, there is no sound of a barking dog.


End file.
